Since 1993, Robert Berger gathered practical and managerial experience in software design and development for embedded systems with and without hard real-time requirements. Since the beginning of the 21st century, he has used GNU/Linux on desktop and server class machines, but mainly for embedded practices (automotive, industrial control, robotics, telecoms, consumer electronics, etc.). Robert regularly attends international events such as "Embedded World", "Embedded Software Engineering Congress", "Embedded Systems Conference", and "Embedded Linux Conference" as an expert and lecturer. His speciality is mainly training, but also consulting (in German or English) worldwide. Robert's expertise ranges from the smallest real-time systems (FreeRTOS) to set-ups with multiple processors/cores and embedded GNU/Linux (user-, kernel-space, device drivers, hardware interfacing, debugging, multi-core, Yocto Project) with a focus on free and open source software. Robert is a globe-trotter. He is CEO & Embedded Software Specialist at Reliable Embedded Systems which is based in St. Barbara, Austria, and when not travelling, lives with his family in Athens, Greece.

Robert initially implemented and later on supervised the system software development for digital TV set-top boxes. His responsibility reached from the lowest software layers (hardware interface) up to the porting of a Java virtual machine on various different hardware platforms with two operating systems (ST20/VxWorks, x86/Linux, PPC405/Linux, MIPS/Linux, SH/Linux, ARM/Linux,...). The total amount of code was roughly 500K lines of Java and 800K lines of ANSI C code (drivers, common). Due to his experience, he was chosen to be the software integration manager for the first OpenTV based electronic program guide for Sky New Zealand and coordinating teams from Pace, Zenith, Motorola, OpenTV and NDS among others. The last couple of years he was heading the team in charge of porting the in house middleware for FS|CDN to various IPTV set-top boxes (Amino, Wegener, Entone, Pirelli,...). The FS|CDN middle-ware solution is used among others by Telekom Serbia with roughly 100K set-top boxes.

Robert was teaching assistant for “Introduction to Embedded Systems”, which was lectured by Prof. Ragunathan Rajkumar (Carnegie Mellon University), and dealing with real-time OS labs using Intel Xscale at the Athens Information Technology Centre of Excellence for Research and Graduate Education.

Robert wrote low-level software (system startup and test code in C167 assembly) for an engine control unit of one of the first common rail diesel systems, which went into production with Audi, among others. Besides this he wrote a compression algorithm (”Nearly matching strings”) to compress the executable code by a minimum of 50%, which is still used to program the engine control units in a production environment.